


The Desolation of Smaug

by unorigelnal (jayburding)



Category: The Hobbit (2012), The Hobbit - All Media Types, The Hobbit - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Fluff and Angst, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-09
Updated: 2013-04-09
Packaged: 2017-12-08 00:12:51
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,680
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/754715
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jayburding/pseuds/unorigelnal
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Lonely Mountain is aptly named.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Desolation of Smaug

**Author's Note:**

> For a [prompt](http://hobbit-kink.livejournal.com/2235.html?thread=3304379#t3304379) on the kinkmeme about Smaug mistaking Bilbo for a hatchling.

Hatchlings are raised on stories of the treasures that lie within dwarven realms. It’s a rare drake that doesn’t learn to covet the homes of dwarves, but rarer still is the drake strong enough to consider flying against even the least of them. The dragons of the War of Wrath might have had the fire in them for such a task, but the dragons of newer ages are smaller and cooler, and no more capable of taking a dwarven realm than they are of flying to the Moon.

Then there is Smaug, a fire drake of a size not seen since the greatest of his fathers. He aspires to be as great as Ancalagon, to burn so fierce that he sets the skies alight when he flies. For the dragon he thinks himself to be, taking a dwarven realm is not such a pipedream, and for the successor to Ancalagon, it can only be the greatest realm of all.

Smaug takes Erebor because he can, and laughs to see the creatures flee from him as he scorches his signature into the mountainside. The fires are still burning when the dwarves who survived pass through the trembling wreck of Dale and out into the wilderness beyond, and Smaug, looped around the mountain peak, salutes them with a plume of flame that can be seen as far off as the Grey Mountains. He waits until they have all vanished beyond the farthest range of his sight before he finally slithers inside the mountain and carves out the new shape of his den from the riches within.

Erebor is wealth enough to content even a fire drake, but dragons live for a long, long time, and when there are none to share it with, none to fill the silence but the lonely chatter of one voice, those years begin to stretch out ahead and the will to stand the interminable eternity snaps piece by piece by piece, like fraying cord. So Smaug buries himself in the piles of gold he has stolen, the jewels he routed three generations of dwarven kings to call his own, and tries not to see how they glitter in the light he casts until a thousand false dragon eyes look back at him from his prize.

He hears the whispered voices in Dale call his new home the Lonely Mountain, and nearly razes the town to the ground out of sheer hatred of the idea that those mortals, but a blink in his time span and nearly as worthless, could have seen the truth of it so easily. Instead, he sleeps away the years to forget how his blackened coal of a heart shrivels without the heat of company, and dreams of companions, family and lovers and children, that time and fire of another kind have stolen away from him. Smaug is not the last of his kind, but he might as well be.

It takes a thief to stir him from his stupor, and he rouses himself from his mountain for the first time in a mortal lifetime, circling and scarring the mountainside with his flame. Any would be burglar is swallowed by the heat or too long gone for Smaug to care unless the creature is fool enough to come back; except it isn’t, because the creature dares to return the following night.

Smaug is waiting for it this time, the dim gold of his watchful eyes hidden by the brightness of the hoard that surrounds him. He hears it scrabble through the coins and smiles to himself, stretching ready to pounce when it comes within range. He strikes like a snake and corners the thief against the nearest coin mound, smiling sweet death on the creature foolish enough to steal from a dragon.

The creature shrieks and curls away from him, as if trying to hide. The flash of scales in his own reflected light stops Smaug dead in his tracks, and his great heart stutters for a moment. The bright gleam of the creature curled against the gold coins is small, so small compared with his bulk that he thinks of hatchlings still wet from the egg before he thinks of burglars, and then it is too late. All he can see is a coil of quicksilver, soft and new, and entirely alone.

“Here, little one,” he rumbles to the tiny serpent and reaches out to it with one huge paw. Its shape is strange, and even the smell he should have recognised is unfamiliar. Its skin ripples under the pressure of his claws but does not give, and shimmers with a colour that can only be mithril. It grieves the great dragon to think that such a fresh eggling had already felt the need to harden its scales with a coat of metals.

Smaug draws the hatchling close to him with the curve of one paw, against the bare scales over his heart, the only place where the heat of him can still bleed through unhindered. His armour had never been completed, but then eggs could not be warmed with a diamond hide.

“How are you here?” he asks, but the hatchling does little more than whimper and try to pull away. He does not allow it: the chill of its skin disturbs him too much. If the hatchling could not heat itself it should never have been away from its parent.

He dips his head to inspect the hatchling closer, to take in the scent of it, and he realises why it smells so strange. Dwarf; it smells of dwarf. Even after his many years as master of the mountain, Smaug’s lair still reeks quite irreparably of its former lords, so he had not given it a second thought when he first caught the scent on the hatchling. But this, this was fresh enough to burn his nose. There were dwarves here again, and they could only have brought the hatchling with them.

Smaug’s anger scorches the air around him, though he bites back the inferno raging under his skin and in his belly when he hears the hatchling whimper. He is quick to console it, rumbling draconic platitudes that he had heard from his own parents mortal lifetimes ago.

“You’re safe now, little one,” he says, and feels the tiny serpent shudder against him as the cold mithril of its scales finally start to warm up. “They won’t have you again. No creature could ever hope to hold a dragon.”

He raises himself from his bed of gold for the second time in as many days, wondering at his energy after so long sleeping the world away, and tucks the hatchling in amongst the coins as he shakes out his wings.

“They are here on my mountain, aren’t they? They wouldn’t have ventured too far without their prize.” He spits the last word like the foul taste it is. The hatchling shifts at his feet but he hushes it again.

“I will find them,” he assures it. “I will find them and I will make them suffer for daring to think they could take a dragon. They will burn until their bones crack and turn to ash.”

He bursts from his lair, bright with the heat of his promise, and lays waste to the mountain.

Smaug returns with no certain proof that he has destroyed those he set out to find, but the sides of the Lonely Mountain are scorched back to the bedrock. Nothing could have survived; he made sure of that.

He walks carefully as he enters the main chamber again, for hatchlings are curious and he did not trust the little one to stay put with such a hoard to explore, and it was so small even a knock from his paw could damage it. So very small... its parents could only be dead. Dwarves could not have gotten near such a new hatchling otherwise. He had made them pay for it, but it had not completely assuaged his anger.

“Hatchling,” he calls, low and deep like a mother’s voice, though he scarcely remembers how a mother sounds.

The mountain is as quiet within as the blank, burning mountainside without. He cannot hear anything beyond the shimmer of shifting coins beneath his feet, and the hammer-beat of his heart.

“Hatchling?” but there is only silence to greet him.

Smaug finds the coin mound where he made his bed and digs through it, but the hatchling is not there. He tears apart every pile around him, looking for that telltale glitter of silver scales, but there is nothing, just the dull burn of gold that goes on and on. He melts his nest in his anger, and molten streams coil past his claws, finding the seams in his scales and burning. He ignores it like he would the gnat bite of an arrow.

The dwarves have eluded him. They hadn’t been beyond; they had been within his mountain, within his den, and free to run through and take the hatchling again while Smaug had been posturing out in the air. They could be halfway to Dale by now, dragon and all, laughing at his folly.

They have the hatchling, and he is alone again. Alone in the Lonely Mountain.

“No!”

Smaug tears out into the night, lit by the still burning ruin of the mountainside and storms through the red twilight towards Dale. He nearly glows with the ferocity of his anger, wreathed in flame and smoke so he appears like an avenging storm, the first fatal edge of Armageddon.

Are you watching, little one?” he whispers to the air as the fire within him surges out and the buildings of Dale curl and crumple in the heat like houses built of paper. The shoreland woods wither in the blaze, and he circles to strike again and turn it all to ash, always searching for the quicksilver flash of mithril.

“Look for me,” he cries to the red touched night. “I will protect you.”

All that finds him is a black arrow in the dark, and Smaug falls, extinguished.


End file.
